MAILING LIST SIGNUP
This is a review of both THERAPY DOGS and its definitively-necessary epilogue REUNION—sleekly included on the blu-ray release. Relentless spoilers.
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It had always seemed like some appropriate sign that Ethan didn’t need me publicly rooting for him when stupid-ass letterboxd kept not displaying my review for Therapy Dogs, the greatest high school film I’ll ever watch and that you should ever watch. There wasn’t much I could contribute anyway in this crispy relatively-has-been-never-was bitter older colleague conduit carcass that types this piece.
That is until I also saw what is essentially the real final 20m52 of the film, annexed as Reunion: A Life After High School. It could not be more void of hyperbole to impress the necessity to experience it immediately sequentially after the principal feature.
As an older unsuccessful version of Ethan, I ostensibly place my hopes and dreams in him, which is why I have such misgivings with the fact that Ethan murders himself at the end of the principal feature and has his white friends find out what happens next.
But from the first moment of this Reunion epilogue, Ethan resurrects himself, and with a grace akin to my hope for humanity, is not only at peace with his vagabond living spirit as a metafilmmaker—but gives himself the self-love to be the acknowledged driver of this entire Therapy Dogs saga that is and was always fundamentally his.
Everyone featured in Therapy Dogs—from Justin to Kevin to those with the briefest sometimes most pseudo-psychotic of roles—was brilliant and quintessential to the success of the film. I’m not ever diminishing or dismissing that. I wanna think I understand more than the simpleton comfortable “filmmaker” that the more DIY you go, the more you don’t take for granted the very self-made volunteer bonds who give life to the art you wish to pull out of yourself.
That said, I feel like even Ethan’s closest friends, collaborators, and confidantes on the film’s journey and production could agree with me that Ethan in ways does everything imaginable in Therapy Dogs to make it seem like Therapy Dogs is not narrated by him but everyone else around him, and that he is a mere inconsequential wanderer through his own docufictional design.
And that would be fine if the fudging motion picture wasn’t quintessentially and holistically about Ethan and his outsider view of the world growing up, blending in to degrees, and all the same sticking out like a beautifully-sore visible-minority thumb. But being a badass wanderer was totally my thing before Ethan hitchhike-drove forever past me, so not only am I deep-cut upset that I’ll never be credited with what he and Avalon Fast [love Honeycomb] are celebrated for at 27+ years my junior, but this is what made it impossible to rewatch Therapy Dogs, cause his bordering-sadist level of self-dismissal to the point of self-fictitious-homocide in spite of everyone else’s opportunity of continued narrative mortality—as someone who cares about Ethan as a friend and not simply as his 5-year-plan-homeless elder desperately clinging to his coattails in whatever futile manner—this is why I couldn’t rewatch it.
Until Reunion.
Maybe it was his distance between the mainline narrative to this. Maybe it was his already-growth as an introspective 13-year old giving himself one last epiloguous chance to feel a sense of belonging in the metatexual docufictitious reality of his own craft, self-exploration, and storytelling. I don’t know. Ethan doesn’t tell me anything. In fact it can largely feel like I’m projecting these takes onto the whole of his art, to which Ethan has my unasked-for blessing to agree with and then take full credit for. But for whatever revelatory reason(s) in Reunion—and I cannot re-stress this enough: the definitive last 20+ minutes of Therapy Dogs—Ethan gets to not only survive and live, but to exist. Even if he’s visually onscreen proportionately less—as is the case with the whole of Therapy Dogs—
—this is his story.
Here: everyone—even Justin who was displayed as the star—is one other figure in Ethan’s melancholically blissful wanderer journey. Whereas Ethan was constantly at odds with his own presence and sense of belonging in the feature while everyone else is having a riot—here the tables are flipped.
Here everyone’s fuckin miserable to varyingly obvious degrees while Ethan’s still uncynically recording for some hope that can be digitally immortalized one last time with these people who will almost certainly never be in the same project ever again.
This isn’t in any way to say that Ethan has suddenly ego-tripped and imposed himself as the brilliant visionary lord. But rather it is the self-kindness to let himself live—from his docu-to-fiction self. All the while, his command of the line between fiction and non-fiction transcends its own previous peaks—past the highest level of the water tower Ethan and Justin had climbed.
And here Ethan reaches higher than ever and lights a firework anew.
High school does end. That’s the climactic reveal that always spoke for itself.
But Ethan will go further than ever.
My hopes and dreams are resurrected and continue to travel with Ethan Eng.
OPEN DOOM CRESCENDO 